For a moment I thought Elizabeth expected there to be more to that story. Another ending, perhaps. A better one. Sometime during my retelling she had gone back to her scissors and paper. I watched as she snipped and brushed the droppings from her knee into a small trash bin that she retrieved from my bedside. The pile of discarded bits was an impressive one.
“You know,” she said as she cut, “of all the stories you’ve told me tonight, I think that one counts the most.”
“Really?” I asked. I had never considered there were some things in the box that meant more than others. Were there things that should be remembered and others that must?
“Yes,” she said, “because it’s time for your do-over, Andy.”
Another sliver of paper fell into the trash.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I don’t have anything to do over. I don’t need no second chance. I haven’t messed up the first one.”
She kept cutting and said, “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not talking about setting things right, I’m talking about doing what you were meant to do.”
“What I’m meant to do?” I asked. “I’m doing what I’m meant to do the best way I know how to do it. I run a gas station. It’s not rocket science. And I didn’t have a choice. Grandpa died, and Grandma needed the money coming in.”
“People are made for more than they usually become, Andy. Not to say that’s their fault. Life gets in the way sometimes, and it’s easy for people to lose their perspective. They forget about the things that matter because the things that don’t can seem so big and so necessary.” Elizabeth paused long enough to make the universal sign of crazy by moving the scissors in a looping motion around her ear. “Gets their thinking all screwed up. I’m not talking about a job, I’m talking about a purpose. That’s two different things. One gives you a living, and the other gives you a life.”
“Then I don’t know what my purpose is,” I said.
Elizabeth put the scissors down.
“That’s because we’re not through yet,” she said. “There’s still one more thing in your box.”
And there it was.
Of all the futility of man, none was as pointless as the fight against the inevitable. I’d hoped to stretch out the contents of my box as long as I could, until either I gave out or Elizabeth did, and I was set aside in favor of other pained souls in other darkened rooms. But then came the inevitable, the rush of the expected, fueled by one man who wanted to set an order to his life and one woman determined to help him.
I had run out of stories.
Elizabeth had been right. She had always been right. There must be a valor to live this life, a courage born of grace and a knowing that things are more than they appear to be. For the first time I saw the world divided not according to race or nation or sex, but according to the ones who were conscious enough to know they were sleeping and determined to kick themselves awake, and the ones who chose just to roll over and slumber more.
Elizabeth drew near.
“There was a soldier here once,” she said. “He had gone off to war because he felt his country calling. To him, it was an almost holy act. For three years he fought in sand and mountains, through city streets and tiny villages, trekking in lands that had been battlefields since time immemorial. He saw friends fall. He saw his enemy fall. He bled and he sweat and he cried, and then he came home. Three months later I sat in his room here at the hospital. He’d tried to kill himself.”
“Why?”
“Because he thought the fight ended when the guns fell silent. It doesn’t. Not for anyone. Because the real war is never five thousand miles away from anyone, Andy. The real war is in the heart. It’s in the soul. This world’s a mess because people are a mess.”
“And I’m a mess?”
“Aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.
“Well then,” she said, squeezing my hand, “let’s find that out together. Small steps, Andy. We’re almost done. I promise you that. Just a little farther now.”
I looked down into the box. The angel key chain was the only thing left. It sparkled and stared at me, both taunting and begging for my attention.
“Andy, everything, every little thing, comes down to this.”
I looked up at her. “That’s what he told me,” I said. “When he was here, that’s what he said.”
“The Old Man?”
I nodded.
“You might not believe him after everything that’s happened, Andy. You might not trust him. I understand that. But do you trust me?”
“I more than trust you, Elizabeth.”
Those words seemed less to me then than they would be later. At the time I spoke those words to say I trusted her with more than my secrets, I had trusted her with my past and my present as well. But later I knew the truth of what I was trying to say. In those words I had come as close as I ever had to telling a woman that I loved her.
“Tell me, Andy,” she said.
I picked up the key chain and dangled it between us. It shimmered in the dim light and washed me in anger and pain. The truth? I had no courage. There was nothing more I wanted than to put it back into the box, latch the top, and never look at it again. But the truth was also this—sometimes courage arises within the hearts of men, and sometimes it arises in the fear of disappointing those whom we love. I could not disappoint the woman beside me.
The Old Man had been right to say Elizabeth had been sent by God. She, not he, had become my angel.
From wherever that courage came, I found it. And with that finding came not the last step of my journey, but surely the most important.
“His name was Eric,” I told her.